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Instantly I am so hot, I must tear it off . . . Reading about the Supreme Court's latest setback to civil rights. One of the justices is quoted as saying: "The fact that low-paying, unskilled jobs are overwhelmingly held by blacks is no proof of racism."
Flash
. . . Thinking about what I could have said, should have said:
Flash
. . . [quoted from Rainer's screenplay]
The implication seems to be that you question whether at least some of the symptoms of menopause have anything to do with the physical changes occurring.
Rainer:
That was physiological license; it was a way of bringing together the body and the external, social issues: race, especially.
MacDonald:
I ask because during a particularly stressful period of my relationship with Pat [O'Connor, MacDonald's wife], she felt her hot flashes were pretty closely related to the psychic stress caused by outside circumstances.
Rainer:
I've heard of only one corroboration of this. It certainly isn't my experience, but it sounds plausible. In
Privilege
it was a way of bringing together everything in the film, a kind of unresolved conclusion.
There are other wild goose chases: Jenny's remark that postmenopausal women don't have REM sleep, for instance. It doesn't seem to be many older people's experience that they don't dream anymore.
MacDonald:
How did you find your way to the people you interviewed?
Rainer:
A number of them were old friends. Two of the women in California I've known since I was a teenager. Once I found one person, I found another.
MacDonald:
Were there people interviewed that you didn't use?
Rainer:
Yes. And the original interviews are much, much longer. When I first started, I thought, "My god, this film's going to be ten hours long!" Then as I got the other parts of the film together, particular segments of the interviews began to pop out and be relevant.
MacDonald:
Have African-Americans or Puerto Ricans played any role in your earlier films? I don't remember any.
Rainer:
Yes. Roles, but not as ethnic-Americans. Blondell Cummings was in
Kristina Talking Pictures
[1976]. David Diao, who's Chinese-American, is also in that film. I was interested in an "interesting"-looking bunch of people. But I had no idea of dealing with racial or ethnic social difference.
MacDonald:
Was there a particular set of circumstances that led you to deal with race in
Privilege
?
Rainer:
No single circumstance. It was a gradual awareness of, one, the limitations of feminist film theory, as it has circulated around Lacanian, neo-Freudian theory; and, two, this incident in my own past that constitutes the flashback in the film, which had been troubling to